Wicked Bird
by Blue-Inked Frost
Summary: Andrey was captured by slavers early on in his journey from Candlekeep. He is now a gladiator, forced to fight in the Copper Coronet. Then he meets a mysterious woman who offers to buy him. Alternate universe, Evil Aerie.
1. Chapter 1

Written for LateToTheParty for the Baldur's Gate Gift Exchange 2019. My dear friend, when I was matched to you in this gift exchange, I thought I would dig up an old idea that you gave to me. I hope that you enjoy this!

—

"_Fight!_"

The smell of the crowd in the Copper Coronet was a living creature in its own right. It was thick, pungent, pulsing and twitching like a gargantuan animal within and above the crowd. Each breath of the baying audience made up a whole greater than the sum of its parts, ebbing and flowing with the masses of guests and guards and prisoners.

Andrey stood in the arena, wearing only a lice-ridden loincloth and blue feathers across his back.

"For _your_ viewing pleasure: the Peacocks fight the Rattlers!"

The cage across the way slid open with a rusted sigh. Three more men stepped out of it. They wore scaled headdresses with silly fangs on top of their heads, and carried weapons. _Elphas, Drakebill, and Ghosh_, Andrey knew. Men with names. Men with a past before they were dragged and chained and caged here like he was. Men that he couldn't afford to think of as men - because if he did he'd end up just as dead as them.

Beside him, Kapur and Tania surged forward. Andrey followed them.

"Watch them go, my fine ladies, gentlemen and assorted street scum of the Copper Coronet!" the master of ceremonies gloated. The crowd's yell was moderate. This was only an opening act, after all. There was much more to come.

Elphas was slow in his left leg, dragging it behind him. Andrey swung the club they'd given him. The other man met it with his rusted sword. _Make it a show_, Andrey thought. He and Elphas had the bond of prisoners, men and women made to fight for others' entertainment.

But the arena was kill or be killed.

Kapur leapt like a wild capuchin around his opponent. Tania was swift and strong and sure, as if she were a living incarnation of the spear she carried. Elphas' breath smelt of onions. Andrey wanted to vomit. He hit hard at the man. Elphas' blade swept between his defences. His shins stung; he saw and felt blood.

The first time Andrey bled in a fight, he was outside Candlekeep. A woman whose face he never saw threw a fiery stinging dart across his cheek. It flayed his skin open. His foster father called at him to run, threw a spell of fear after him to make sure he did. The next moment he saw his father cut in half by a man in heavy armour. He was barely conscious of that night's long nightmare after that. He ran and stumbled through the woods until he could run no more.

Then, in the morning, he was captured and made a slave by bandits.

Andrey spent the Iron Crisis as a mining slave in the Cloakwood pits. His back strained and broke side by side with so many other men stolen from Nashkel and Beregost and even Baldur's Gate. A band of strange adventurers - Zhentarim, an elf wielding a moonblade, a northern battle-cleric - destroyed the mine. Andrey and his fellow slaves escaped the deadly pits just before the entire Cloakwood mine was flooded. For a brief moment they thought they were free, though they had nothing to their names but iron dust in their lungs and a few scraps of threadbare clothing. They made it to a fishing village on the coast, and were promptly taken by Amnian slavers.

Now Andrey was the property of the Copper Coronet fighting pits.

He struck back at Elphas. His club cracked the man's shoulder. Bones shattered against each other. Before Elphas could raise his sword again, Andrey slammed him with his right shoulder. He knocked him down, forced him to drop his weapon. They rolled around on the arena ground, covered with grey rushes soaked with blood and dirt. They got in the way of Tania's opponent Ghosh, and the three of them striving hopelessly on the ground made a hilarious picture to the audience before Tania thrust her spear through the man's chest.

Blood stained the ground. The first kill of the night.

"Finish him, fool!" Tania ordered Andrey, pulling her spear loose from the dead body. She shouldn't have wasted her time. Drakebill had finally stopped Kapur-the-monkey mid leap. He struck Tania from behind. She rose, blood pouring from her face, and hit back at him.

Rolling on the ground with Elphas, Andrey saw pale blobs of faces in the crowd above him. He knew every last man and woman there craved his blood. He recognised the one face he hated most of all, the master Lehtinan. He'd never come closer than twenty feet away from Lehtinan while being chained in a cell, yet he had memorised every last detail of the man's long thin rat face and beady eyes, the right green and the left brown. Lehtinan owned the Copper Coronet and held all of them in captivity. It was even worse than the mines, for at least there the slaves were not forced against each other. Andrey wanted to kill Lehtinan more than any other man.

Beside Lehtinan was a woman with hair so pale it shone in the dark.

"Not much of a show, I admit, my lady, but it's merely an opening act," Lehtinan said. "Believe me, I've set aside far choicer specimens for your consignment."

The woman raised a silver wine goblet to her lips. No pity showed on her fair pale face. Her ears were sharply pointed, a full-blooded elf. "I do _not_ believe you. Which is why I will inspect the consignment before delivery."

Andrey thrust Elphas off him. He punched his face. Elphas shuddered. The crowd urged him on. He pummelled the man until he wasn't struggling any more. Andrey took up his club again and got to his feet, wounded and winded. Drakebill was the other last man standing. A bloodied, swaying man with a tattered snakeskin wound around his head facing another man scarcely better off, in a pathetic peacock-feather cloak.

He and Drakebill were a comedy act. Clowns who could barely stumble around to hit each other. The crowd tittered and yelled for them to get on with it.

Drakebill's weighted fist crashed into Andrey's jaw.

"_Remember_ that last bite of bread? Do you _remember_, bastard?" he hissed.

Andrey remembered that bite of mould-ridden bread lying on the cell floor, a threeday ago. He'd been desperate for food and not at all proud of himself for what he'd done. He knew what Drakebill meant. No mercy would be shown tonight. Not by his fellow prisoner nor the crowd nor their master.

_I will live to kill Lehtinan._

A frightening rage rose inside Andrey. When this happened to him, he almost felt like he was no longer himself. He felt mad, insane, overwhelmed. His very blood seemed to torment him with hot fury. It gave him a last burst of speed and strength to bring his enemy down.

Then Lehtinan's soldiers dragged Drakebill's body out. Unlike the gladiators, they were well armed and fully armoured, and used long staffs with hooks to handle their prisoners at a distance. Trying to attack them was pointless. Andrey fell to his knees. This was the end for him. The guards would drag him back into his cell next.

"The fancy Peacocks triumph, grinding the Rattlers into the dust!" the master of ceremonies yelled. "What do we do with the winner, you pirates and slatterns?"

Then somewhere from the middle of the crowd came the faintest of shouts. "Hendak!"

That name alone was enough to light a bonfire to them. "Give him to Hendak!" another echoed.

"Bring Hendak!" came the answering cry. It spread like wildfire in a forest. Hendak was the crowd's hero, yet he was only a prisoner himself. Lehtinan's star gladiator of the entire arena. He was a Northman captured away from his family, a strong man who was the greatest fighter of them all. He was a decent man who spared his fellow prisoners anything he could and bore their loads on his broad, uncomplaining, whip-scarred back. The crowd loved him, and would never dream of setting him free.

Lehtinan gave in to the crowd, and gestured sharply to his major-domo to please them. The pale beautiful elf beside him waited and watched, laying down her silver goblet in a graceful gesture. Her wide blue eyes swept across the arena like the eyes of a bird of prey.

The metal door in the arena grated open. Hendak, the gladiator above all other gladiators, walked out.

_A good show, and mayhaps the crowd lets you live another day_, Andrey knew. But there were always more slaves coming to fill dead men's shoes.

He was already exhausted from his battle, fumbling, and Hendak was fresh. Hendak tried what Andrey had attempted with Elphas, to spin it out. But the crowd grew impatient. They begged Hendak to finish the job.

"Put your back into it, lad!" Hendak hissed at him. Andrey swung his club, far too slow, in the air around Hendak.

Hendak lashed out with a fist. Only Andrey knew that he'd pulled the punch. He fell back, then tried to return the blow.

Boos and hisses rang out from the crowd. "Kill the peacock! The bird is foul!"

Hendak bludgeoned Andrey further back, sorrow in his face. Andrey howled in desperation. There was nothing left for him but that howl.

Andrey's voice was ruined in the Cloakwood mines. In Candlekeep, he'd sung often with the chanters, spent much of his spare time gathering a scrapbook of songs together, imagined one day travelling the world as a troubadour singer. But enough screaming and iron dust in the lungs will ruin even a voice like Storm Silverhand's. Andrey had only been able to croak since the mines.

But he shouted nonetheless.

Andrey cried out. Kill Lehtinan, kill the whole crowd of spectators, kill the fair immortal elf who looked down on them all like they were nothing. He wanted it more than he could say, more than he ever would be able to say it. He felt his blood rise in him more than it ever had before.

Hendak struck. Then came a flash of light. As Andrey floundered backward, he saw it. Tiny globes of raw shining force somehow coalesced out of the air before him at his will. They battered Hendak's arm, and suddenly Andrey understood.

_Blood and fear, by all the gods!_ He was immortal, untouchable. He drove forward.

Hendak defended himself. Perhaps frightened by Andrey, his blow was swift and strong. A blow. A silver strike.

Andrey fell. His hand was numb. He stared at the red blood flowing all around him. He looked at his own hand, which was lying six feet away from him.

Hendak dropped to his knees. He bound the bleeding stump with cord drawn from his own sword hilt, while the crowd booed.

Andrey prayed for but one thing. That he would be allowed to die at last. Fading voices chattered above him.

"Include him in my consignment," spoke a high sweet voice. She sounded like a glass bell, rung in winter, her tone rising above others like a white finch over a blue sky.

Lehtinan's snort could only be imagined, enmeshed in the noise of the crowd. "My best gladiator? You'll have to triple the - "

"No. I want the fallen one. Send someone to tend his wound before he dies," said the woman.

"Sure. Two hundred gold."

She laughed - and Andrey knew well who she was, in the tatters of his fading consciousness, the cold lovely elf sitting high up by the slaveowner, the elf with sharp bones and a pale fall of platinum hair, the woman who treated people as if they were property. She laughed as if Lehtinan cracked a particularly outrageous joke. "He is useless to you now. You will pay me twenty gold, and I will take him off your hands."

"He cost me a hundred and fifty, and I know you want him. Since you're a good customer, I'll sell at cost."

"Let's not ruin our relationship with haggling," she said. "Add him to my consignment, and I will give you this consideration: I will pay you all we have agreed on immediately, rather than instalments. And I will consider you for future contracts."

"Very well, lady. Let's drink to it. May we have many more agreements."

And wine goblets clinked together in agreement. Someone tightened a binding about Andrey's wrist. A shriek ripped from him and he fell into utter darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

Andrey recognised the woman who floated above him in his fever dreams. The same woman. _She bought me_, he told himself. She had an elf's face, a pointed chin and tilted eyes under the black headdress covering her hair. He knew he was in a bed. He knew his hand hurt horribly. He felt hot and sweaty, with a pain that never stopped. He kept dreaming and waking up with the pain, and she was often there around him. _The slaver._ Friend to Lehtinan, master of slave gladiators. There was a smell of something sharp and green, something medicinal. He kept trying to scrape the paste off his right wrist, but someone kept reapplying the noxious stuff. _If a slaver is trying to make you live, they expect something dreadful from you._ Someone cleaned his sheets and moved his body.

He started to take stock of the room. _I'll never escape. I should find my own death._ Dark oak beams crossed a background of pale-coloured clay above him. It was a plain room, as if nobody really lived here. Besides the bed, the only furnishings were a stool and a heavy walnut chest. A square brown rug lay on the floor, looking nondescript and costly at the same time. The window was small and placed high on the wall. The light was strong, nearly midday. The door looked thick and heavy, and Andrey assumed it was locked. _I need to find out. Don't have to just give up._

He pushed himself out of bed, his head reeling. _Maybe the slavers will have me killed for trying to escape. That's fine._ His feet sank into the depths of the thick rug. He stumbled over his own feet, trying not to think about his right hand. His right stump. He didn't need to look at it.

He put his left hand on the door. It moved; he felt it move. It wasn't his head lying to him. The slavers forgot to lock him in. He needed to leave now. The door moved and opened outward, and because he was leaning on it, he fell down. The ground cracked on his chin. The floor was spinning again, and he tried to get up. He tried, and tried again. But the world only blackened around him. _If this is the end_, he thought, _I'm fine._

He woke up again as if nothing had happened. Back in the same bed, the same tiny window glinting overhead. Someone was dragging a cool cloth over his face.

"It is never locked," a woman's voice said. _She is the slaver who bought me_, Andrey knew. As if he needed to listen to her lies. "When you're healed, you will be free to go. But I hope that you will choose to stay."

_All a pack of lies_, Andrey thought, but he never said it. "My name is Andrey," he said. Scratched, rather; his voice was gone. He was wrong to say anything at all. A slave's name didn't matter.

"I think you're an interesting person, Andrey. I am glad to meet you," the elf said. "I know that you're in pain, and I know what Lehtinan did to you. And I know that someone else owned you before him. You've suffered, and I want you to rest. I don't want Alcaze to have to pick you up from the floor again. His back isn't what it used to be, you know!" The corners of the elf's mouth turned up, as if she wanted to make a weak joke.

So he hadn't imagined trying to escape, and fainting on the ground. She acknowledged that it had happened instead of lying to him.

"I hope we can talk more, when you can understand me," the elf said. She always spoke so slowly, Andrey thought. She lifted the cloth away from his face. Then she touched him with her hand, spreading five fingertips evenly across his forehead. "You're going to sleep again, but you will wake soon. Don't worry."

When he woke up again, the sun was lower. A different day. Most of the pain in his head had cleared away. There was a different woman, human this time, busying herself around him, sweeping into a dustpan on the floor.

"Ah, you're awake. The mistress said you'd likely be. She was called away to the hills, but she'll return. I trust she'll be safe," the woman said. Her face was brown and wrinkled; her hair was salt and pepper, tied in a knot behind her head. She wore a grey dress with no fineries or decoration, but the fabric was fairly good quality. "Do you talk, or did they cut your tongue as well as your hand? Wretched scum, the lot of them."

"Yes. Ma'am," Andrey said. He didn't know what kind of respect he had to show to her.

"It's Diana," the woman said. "No ma'aming me, my lad. Diana Kettleburn's no woman for fancy airs. Not after I've changed your sheets these two dozen times, and seen all there is to see."

"What ... what will she do to me?" Andrey said. "I'll do my best ... "

"Hush," Diana said, silencing him with a word. "Know that the mistress'll do to you as she did to me. There's no doubt about that," she said. "I was stolen from Baldur's Gate, in the troubles there. Remember those?" She continued abruptly as Andrey shook his head dumbly. "Well, perhaps our troubles seemed small if you were somewhere else that year. You couldn't find a skerrick of good iron left in the Sword Coast any more'n a naked woman at a Banite pleasure party. The Grand Dukes all got assassinated, and then pirates thought they'd a right to raid our city. I used to be a maid in one of the houses by the docks. But they took us and they sold us to a hobgoblin village up near Neverwinter. I thought I'd be there until the bastards killed me, but then she came. The mistress killed the hobgobs, and set us all free. There's no one in the Realms like her."

"If she set you free, why are you still here?" Andrey said.

The old woman's eyes flashed black fire at him. "Because there's nowhere else I'd want to be, you fool. You don't know our mistress."

_Perhaps I don't want to know your mistress_, thought Andrey. _I will leave._ He raised himself up on his elbows, trying not to look at his right arm. "Can you get me clothes?" he demanded.

"Right on. Trousers over there." Diana pointed to the chest in the corner, but Andrey did not like the smile that lurked under her wrinkles. "When you can put 'em on yourself, you're free to go."

—

Andrey sat in the corner of a bustling kitchen. A youth with an eyepatch and a girl balancing on a crutch peeled potatoes. A hunchbacked chef flipped two pans' worth of pork knobbers on the open fire at once. An ancient half-orc chopped lettuce and radishes for the salad with a gargantuan cleaver. A woman with a badly scarred face bustled about with napkins and cutlery. The house was far larger than Andrey had realised; it housed a huge staff who were kept busy with preparing feasts, entertainment, and teaching each other a servant's skills. They let him sit here in the corner, munching on a spare roast turnip. He'd talked to most of them, hating more than anything the rusted-over sound of his broken throat. Most of them were slaves, like him, mixed with a few real servants hired the normal way. The elf bought them. In some cases, the elf killed their tormentors after she bought them. She had them work in her mansion, gain a reference chit as a skilled servant, and if they were able to, find a place as a free man or woman.

Most of the men and women here bore scars, like Andrey, but none of them had a missing hand. He was completely useless. There was nothing left for him in the world. Andrey looked at the back of the hand that was left to him. For one single moment, a strange power had come to him as he'd croaked through a wrecked throat. It had stirred within him, demanding blood. And now it had faded, left to nothing.

The fair-haired elf walked in through the doors. All cleared a space for her. The boy stirring the partridge sauce rushed back five paces. You could not imagine the sauce being so daring as to fling itself through the air and leave such a thing as a stain on the elf's immaculate clothing. She was accompanied, as always, by a guard of honour. He was a tall grey-haired man with a forbidding scar across his face. From Diana's description this was Alcaze, bodyguard to the mistress, who'd once peeled Andrey off the floor when he was unconscious. The elf asked a question or gave a greeting to each man and woman she passed by, each of whom were made ecstatically happy by her.

Andrey tried to shoulder himself into his shadowed corner and pass unseen. But she came to him. Her blue eyes met Andrey's gaze as if he could never escape.

"Diana told me you were about," the elf said. Andrey had noticed before that her voice was slow and deliberate almost to the point of parody, clear and gentle even when she spoke like a slaver. "Would you come out to the markets with me?"

She stepped close to him. Her rosebud mouth slipped into a small smile that was almost a child's smile at some mischief. "Alcaze would look _very_ undignified carrying my shopping!" she half whispered, half giggled at him. Her bodyguard in his sharply designed armour would have looked odd with a brown paper parcel or three. "Please, can you help?"

_And a one-armed bear would do you no good either._ Yet Andrey did not say it. Perhaps outside was freedom.

The Amnian sun scorched him and the din was so loud he couldn't hear himself think. It had been so long since Andrey had been among real people like this, among ordinary people who did not see him as a slave. Candlekeep had never been so loud as this. The gladiator crowds had been louder sometimes, but in the worst way possible. Andrey had never seen so many goods in one place. The elf tripped among the stores as if she were walking on air: a gnome's toyshop of wind-up mechanical devices; coloured chalk and bright paints and packets of powders from a stall of artists' materials; weaving silks and shining buttons from a clothier; a basket of exotic eggs from a street-peddler. She held all her own purchases in a string-bag, Andrey couldn't help but notice, and seemed to need little help.

"And some liquorice. It is dreadful of me to admit it, but I have a sweet tooth," the elf confessed. She pouted and then smiled ruefully at the long line snaking in front of the sweet-seller's. Her bodyguard Alcaze stepped closer to her, as if he wanted to protect her from waiting under the sun too long, or some passer-by stepping on her shadow. "Andrey, could you pay for my order with Ribald Barterman the weapons-seller? His shop is on the other side of the market place; the darkest sign you see over there. It ought to be ready for me to collect, but if it is not then that is perfectly all right."

She handed Andrey a plain looking brown velvet bag. She cast him a last pleasant glance as she and Alcaze turned her back on him, entering the queue.

The bag clinked. Andrey couldn't resist a look inside, in a quiet corner of the market. He was just clearing his head, he told himself. The sights and smells were exotic and overpowering. A thousand spices whose names he did not know fought for dominance on his sinuses. In the unobtrusive darkness of the bag, jewels shone from within. Andrey recognised star sapphires, perfect of their kind, a gigantic uncut emerald, dragon's blood rubies glittering with inner light, and even a rogue stone. He knew from Candlekeep lessons that was one of the most valuable gems in the world, for its breathtaking magical potential.

No one was looking at Andrey. The elf was not even expecting her delivery to be today. He could take the fortune in gems and run. He could practically buy Baldur's Gate with these stones. He could be a free man, buy a hundred guards, flee home and lay his hands on a rare book to enter the Candlekeep gates once more. Not that he would want to, with his foster father Gorion dead and to show his mutilation to everyone within.

The elf's pale veil blew about her head in the wind, distant, looking away from the man she'd set free.

Andrey forced himself into Ribald Barterman's shop. The trader gave him a small wooden box in return for the bag. He walked back to the sweet-shop.

She wasn't there any longer. Annoyed, Andrey wandered the market-place. At last he caught sight of a flash of pale primose hair below the billowing tents of yet another booth. She sprung up from her table like a bird when she saw him. All the grim bodyguard did was reach out and take the box, which was probably inestimably valuable, but the elf took Andrey by his left arm.

He stared, bewildered, at the gimmors and devices of this stall. It looked almost like a mage's shop, and yet the people who trouped back and forth were ordinary citizens, not a few of them children. Metallic tubes and pipes and glass jars were hung from the walls, with floating liquids filled with miscellaneous objects, strange powders in many different colours, and vats that hummed and steamed and shook. The rest of the stall was filled with gaily coloured tables, where humans and gnomes and half-orcs alike sat with drinking glasses before them.

"Is not this amazing?" she said lightly. "You mix your own delicious drinks here. The gnomes who own it have created a thousand different flavours! Alcaze is settled with Calishite coffee with chocolate powder, lime essence, and cayenne pepper - a combination that's just right for him." Her grim bodyguard bowed his head before her smile. "I enjoy this stall so much because nothing I make is ever the same. It is an art. Tell me what you like."

The elf's fingers were already busy with powders and vats, setting first one then the next spinning into action, holding a tall crystal glass between her fingers. "A hot day - lemon or lime, I think. Do you like it?" She took the twitch on Andrey's face as assent. "Ice to begin with - a dash of both lemon _and_ lime for freshness - cherry fizz for good cheer - orange zest for life and laughter - and plenty of cashew nut cream." She rested the concoction on top of a shaking metal machine, which settled it all together.

She gave Andrey the glass. Their fingertips brushed against his will as he took it. He tasted a drop, and tried to hide his expression - _sour_ \- but the elf was too quick. She took the glass back and rested her own lips on it.

Then she made a face so twisted and unexpected Andrey could not but laugh. The perfect, remote elf suddenly became a wicked child trying to be grotesque. He stopped his laugh almost as soon as it had come, but he thought that he saw triumph in her eyes anyway.

"_Much_ less sour and more sweetness, I think," she ordered. She tipped out about half the glass. "Honey - pear juice - toffee, with a dash of salt - and certainly the pomegranate." She mixed in a pulp of delicate red, almost the colour that lightly tinted the centre of her cheeks. With a tiny filigreed silver teaspoon, she tasted this drink herself first. Satisfied, she passed it to Andrey.

He drank. It was frost and fizz and sweetness and tang all at once. A thirsty man on a hot day couldn't fail to do it justice.

"There is a story that to eat pomegranate seeds with another person traps you in the underworld for all eternity," Andrey said. It was the longest sentence he had said in a very long time, ever since his voice was ruined. Once, a song about this legend had been his favourite. "In some tellings of it, the pomegranate seeds are an act of choice." An act of choice that stranded you in the underworld for all eternity ... but with the one person that you wanted to live with.

When it became clear Andrey would say no more, the elf answered back. "There always comes a time when you can choose to close your eyes to an uncomfortable truth, or to awaken yourself no matter how painful it may be," she said. She spoke, as always, in her slow, deliberate way. "When that choice came to me, I chose to eat the fruit of knowledge."

"Why do you speak so slowly?" Andrey said. He could have kicked himself. It was a ridiculous - and terribly insulting - thing to say. "My lady, I apo - "

"Because I used to stutter," the elf said. Andrey should have realised that from the moment he'd first heard her. It was a classic tell for people who'd overcome that. "Did you once sing?" she asked. "I thought so, from - from the way you listen."

He nodded. The light of the stall seemed to grow dark as he thought again of how far he had fallen, and how much it was by the slim thread of this elf's whim that he stood on two feet instead of crawled in chains.

"We have more in common than you think, but not more than you will know, Andrey," the elf said. "Please. My name is Aerie. Call me by my name."


	3. Chapter 3

Aerie had taken him to seemingly a dozen temples in Athkatla, but not one could bring back Andrey's lost hand. He would never have been able to afford such a potent spell by himself anyway. It occurred to him to wonder why Aerie didn't seem to employ any priests in her own group, but he had not felt able to use his voice to ask her.

"I want you to come with me tonight," Aerie asked him. She was dressed in a rippling black robe that flowed like water around her. The hood of a heavy cloak concealed her pale hair. "You will need to play a bodyguard. I think it will be worth your while."

She gave him dark clothes and armour similar to that Alcaze wore, a scarf to cover his face, a sword-belt that made a mockery of his loss. Then she gave him a custom object from the dwarven smith Cromwell, the finest craftsman in Athkatla. Andrey knew what it was. He'd been measured for it. A cold and lifeless prosthetic hand, made from light ivory, with a discreet grey glove to cover it.

Andrey dressed himself alone. It was a painfully slow and painstaking process, yet he would not ask for help. Last of all he strapped on the awkward hand to his stump, feeling the weight drag him down. If he rested it against the sword belt, a casual observer would not be able to perceive him.

Aerie's look, he thought, denoted approval rather than impatience when he finally returned to her atrium.

"I have spent rivers of coin to Lehtinan," she said. "Lehtinan has at last arranged a meeting between myself and his supplier; he will be there, of course, to introduce me to her. And tonight, Lehtinan's account falls due."

Aerie nimbly crossed the room and unlocked a drawer so cunningly concealed in a vanity that most would have not seen it was there. Andrey recognised the box within: it was the item she had sent him to pay Ribald Barterman. He had never seen what was inside it.

Nestled inside the wood atop new lurid-green velvet was an old dagger. The metal seemed dull with long years, scratched with use here and there. A plain black gem set in its hilt seemed to suck in light rather than reflect it.

"A gift for you if you choose to take it." Aerie's voice was a hushed, reverent whisper. "This is called the Soultaker dagger. It was made by a worshipper of the Lord of Death, a long time ago. It was used until recently to imprison a demon, and now it has been cleansed of that taint. It is ready for you. Use this dagger if there is someone that you want to kill above all others, someone who deserves not mere death but the enslaving of their soul for eternity. Lehtinan enslaved and murdered countless people, you one among many in his foul trade.

"If it is your will to use this, then you will know what to do when the time comes."

Andrey bowed his head down by the rushing underground waters. He had walked right past Lehtinan, his tormentor, and the man did not know him. He stood in Aerie's shadow, his head bowed, almost a matched pair with Alcaze. He breathed through the scarf that covered his face, and kept his false hand upon his useless sword hilt.

A ship bowed and creaked behind them. The caverns were massive enough to hold a full vessel, a vessel that had crept through rocks to dock in a harbour that should not exist. It was a cargo ship: the cargo were men. It was crewed by monsters, even if they looked human. Moans from cages spread through the air, broken up by orders and blows.

"It is strange to see one of your kind so interested," said Lehtinan's supplier. Hissed, rather. Her voice was cold, so very cold. She wore a veil across her face and was the height of a short human woman. More than that, Andrey had not seen.

"I am in the market for speciality goods," Aerie said. Her voice was sharp as glass. She spoke as if she truly was a slaver, as if she was the monster Andrey had expected her to be when they met. There was something cold and icy inside Aerie that she brought to the surface now, a frost-dusted adamant that matched Lehtinan and the likes of him strike for strike. "If yours are good enough, we may do business. If they are not, I will continue my journey."

"Then I have more than any on the western continent can source," the supplier boasted. "Lehtinan assures me that you will buy what he cannot."

"Lehtinan exaggerates. You will find my standards are higher than his," Aerie said. "His toll in blood is high, but a vast quantity of ore is only of use if one finds the occasional star sapphire. Tell me why you have useful gems."

"I suppose it cannot do harm to tell the story," said the stranger. Her sibilants had an echo to them, as if she had too many teeth in her mouth. "Have you heard of a place called Brynnlaw? No? In that case, you shall not hear of it again. It was a pirates' isle, on which sat Spellhold, a prison asylum owned as private property by the Amnian lords. Strange magics lived there, strange magics and stranger experiments. Lehtinan tells me that such strangeness intrigues you. Oh, yes, my child; Lehtinan has told me much about you, just as he has told you about me.

"Brynnlaw was sacked and ruined. All the souls that still breathed were taken by lucky ships. That is why I have sold and sent more cargo than most traders will see in a lifetime. Buy now, for such an opportunity won't arise again. Spellhold was a magical place. Should you wish to spy a woman who can see into other planes - a little girl who transforms into any shape she desires - a once archmage who travelled beyond the skies and was driven mad by what he saw there - then I have what you wish.

"Do you have what _I_ wish?"

Aerie extended her right hand. She held a dull old piece of rock there, its dark surfaces smooth as glass. "I have the ancient sunstone from the forsaken temple to the sun god Amaunator, buried within the Umar Hills. I offer it to you to hold as a sign of good faith. Take me to see your wares. Then, we will bargain for the rest of what we both have to offer."

It was not the first time Andrey had set foot on a slave ship. He shuddered away from it, each creaking step on the boat a splinter in his soul. He smelt rusty blood in this place, smelt it more than he had done even in the arena. Aerie's black cloak trailed on the ground behind her, seeming to leave tangible marks there. Slaver guards roamed the ship, each of them veiled or hooded to match the seller. Men and women and even children called out from their cages.

A singer's voice from a far distant cage haunted Andrey. "I used to have my pretties, piled up beyond the sky. Oh, how I miss my pretties. I'll find them by and by."

"He was a bard with such a gift for sorcery that his voice could tame armies, once," the seller said. "So gifted was he that was taken to the skies to play before gods. Somehow, the gods took their revenge on him."

A woman in a bloodstained dress sat with her hands folded in her lap. Her eyes were gone. She had scratched them out. Perhaps she had seen too much.

"That sort of thing can be fixed, if you know how," the seller said.

A gnome shook the bars of his cage. He tried to spring at the passers-by like a wild beast, but a guard slammed the shaft of an iron spear into his chest and he was forced to back down.

An elf sat in the corner of his cage with his arms wrapped around his knees. "Bad dog," he repeated over and over again. "Bad dog, bad dog, bad dog."

A little girl looked up with the offer, "Dili turn for you? Dili will be whatever you want. Please, please, mistress." Her body twisted and rippled and turned into a dryad, into a minotaur, into a voluptuous drow. That was the worst of them all, Andrey thought.

"These rarities will go to you, or to another buyer. It makes little difference to me," the seller said, in her coldest voice. "Once they are gone, you will have lost your chance."

"I suppose this is the last cargo from Brynnlaw," Aerie said. Andrey understood what she meant. You always overcrowded a slave ship; there was no sense in giving property the luxury of space to move in. This one was relatively sparse.

"It is, and my crew has tired of such things," the stranger said. "Come to the captain's cabin to settle our deal."

_Come into my parlour_, said the spider to the fly. The cabin was furnished like a coloured illustration of a Calishite brothel in one of the Candlekeep books Andrey hadn't been allowed to read. Plush velvety cushions and blankets, flung haphazardly about the place with no pattern to them. Jars full of dead flowers sending thick scents into the air. Heavy brocade tapestries pinned up on the walls with no heed paid to their clashing colours - one of them falling down and not quite hiding a long scratch mark in the wall, as if some powerful beast had scraped deeply with its fingernails. There had once been a lamp in the centre of the room, but it was bent and damaged, so that Andrey doubted anyone could light it. A guard of Lehtinan's carried a torch for them, but somehow Andrey knew that these people needed no light at all.

Aerie sat at the flimsy gold-gilt table, inspecting the scroll before her. The cabin door closed behind them all. The sun gem lay between her and the seller.

"You have a strong interest in artefacts linked to the sun," Aerie said. "The brightest lights cast the longest and darkest shadows. Who do you serve, that so desires to corrupt the remains of a dead god in this way?"

"I serve my mistress," said the seller.

Aerie spoke softly, in a steady cadence. Her voice was music. "What is your name?"

"Tanova, once of Suldanessellar, now of the dark," the seller said.

"And the name of your mistress?" Aerie's voice was soft, gentle, yet as persistent as a stream. Anyone would have been drawn into its rhythm.

"Bodhi."

Then the seller's head jerked upward in a sudden, dissonant motion. "You think you have gained something from me. But you have not. The name means nothing and she is a goddess now. I brush away your pitiful enchantment, outcast."

Aerie smiled, and said nothing, and snapped her fingers. Then the fragments of black powder that Aerie had trailed from her cloak throughout the slave ship exploded. The light was blinding.

And the battle was joined. Andrey could only gasp at the power on display. Aerie shielded herself with bright steel-blue light and summoned lightning and fire to her hands. Strands of black silk from her hands grew and spread across the walls like webbing, tangling her foes in them. Tanova bared white fangs and sprung. She was a vampire, and so were all her minions. Perhaps there were so few slaves because they had already eaten them all.

Andrey turned. He found himself looking into shining white eyes out of a jet black face. He startled back. But the shadow creature seemed to smile at him, and dashed forward. It flung itself over a guard of Lehtinan's. It tangled and twisted, resisting each blow and stab through it. It was a hollow man: made of black silk with button eyes. Andrey had seen Aerie buy its ingredients, at the marketplace. The woven golems swarmed and bound their enemies in place, whispering to each other like the wind.

Aerie threw an egg at the vampire. The egg brought forth a beacon of fire, erupting, cleansing, immolating Tanova where she stood. The vampire collapsed to the ground, but blackened and burnt she still strove to rise. Aerie summoned shining poles of steel that rose from the ground and pierced her through.

Lehtinan suddenly wrenched open the cabin door. He fled. Andrey raced after him, feet pelting the ground. Other vampiric guards were aroused to race back and forth in the chaos. Aerie's seeds had broken every cage on the ship. A vampire ran straight at Andrey. He sped up rather than slowed, lowered his head, and butted him in the chest. He left the vampire behind to chase after Lehtinan. He leapt off the gangplank, landed awkwardly and rolled, struggled to his feet with his damned stump. Lehtinan fled into his caverns, back to his domains. He would not be allowed to escape again. The ship flared with light from behind him that illuminated Andrey's path. His strides drew closer once more to Lehtinan's cowardly running feet.

A soft hand tapped Andrey on the shoulder. "Not alone," Aerie said. She appeared out of thin air behind him. Lehtinan neared his door back up to his prison - he had to fiddle with his keys, he'd locked it - and then he dropped the keys and turned on his pursuers.

"If you think I'm easily taken you're wrong, bitch. Had a mage long prepare me this." Lehtinan flung a small case the size of a bean to the ground.

Out of Lehtinan's toy there erupted a vast crimson _thing_ with too many teeth. Nothing like this had ever existed on this land, should ever exist on this plane. It was the size of a thousand-year-oak tree, wide and round as a house. It was all made of rippling, blind flesh, except where it had sharp shining teeth the size of a giant's forearm apiece. Its maw brimmed with more of those teeth striping all the way down a throat the size of a well.

Instantly, Aerie was swallowed by it.

"Let her go!" The howl was torn from Andrey's throat. He sounded like a starving wolf. He rushed Lehtinan, pummelled him with his good arm. The trader in so many gladiators' lives was a coward, when alone. Andrey had him down on the ground. He forced his arm over Lehtinan's neck. "Make. It. Stop."

"I can't," Lehtinan got out greedily. Andrey remembered the dagger and drew it. He struck blindly down at Lehtinan's throat. Then he faced the hellish creature that had swallowed the elf whole, armed only with the Soultaker dagger.

He rushed forth and stabbed. The dagger sunk into the creature's flesh. It twitched a bit. It flung him off and to the ground. Then the gaping toothed maw loomed above him.

But from deep inside the creature, something bulged. The creature shook its head from side to side, as if it suffered. It deserved to suffer. An unearthly grumbling howl began from somewhere in its depths.

Then it exploded into gobbets of meat. Powerful magical force had blasted it away from the inside. Aerie emerged from its insides, battered and bruised and dripping with fluid. She had tried to change herself to stone to protect herself. Parts of her limbs were covered by stone, parts were covered by cracked stone, and large parts of her were only red raw flesh. She had never looked more beautiful. She held a red thing with purple veins up in her left hand. The thing still pulsed and beat.

"Your dagger was made to kill demons," Aerie gasped. "Take its heart."

The Soultaker met that last piece of pulsing flesh. Then all stilled. Aerie swayed and staggered on her feet, hurt near to the limits of her endurance. She was tiny, not quite reaching Andrey's shoulders. She carried unimaginable realms of arcane power within her. For a moment, she rested, exhausted.

The moment passed. They forced themselves over Lehtinan's corpse and up to the gladiators' cages. They freed Hendak the Northman and gave him a sword, and after that victory was a foregone conclusion.


	4. Chapter 4

"It is fitting," Aerie said. "The Soultaker dagger imprisons souls. Lehtinan is trapped there for eternity with the demon he summoned."

The gem in the hilt of the dagger no longer seemed so dull and unrelieved. It glittered with a hint of something within. Something that was, perhaps, writhing in desperate pain. Andrey shook his head. That thing unnerved him.

Aerie stepped back from him and bowed her head. She stood over the bier. Alcaze, her old friend, had been murdered by the vampires in the fight on the slave ship.

"The world is transient and all we know and can ever know is change," Aerie addressed the small gathering: Diana, the hunchbacked chef, the boy who stirred sauces, the prisoners from the slave ship. "He has changed and the world yet turns. Alcaze was one of those who caused the world to turn. He gave freely, fought bravely, and was a true friend to all those gathered here today. Yet death is not to be feared. He himself would not have it so. Death await thee, death embrace thee, and let none escape justice."

She lit a set of five wax candles about the bier with a taper. Andrey could feel her sorrow like a tangible thing: a cold heavy beast with claws, chained to her back and bearing her down. He had known similar sorrows in the mines, leaving men he'd considered his friends with no burial to lie in the pits where they fell. The funeral was solemn and dignified, laying a decent man to dust.

Aerie had freed slaves, fought vampires and demons, given the Copper Coronet to Hendak as his own, unleashed a stunning magical power, buried a friend. All in service of - ? Andrey felt there had to be some higher goal behind her actions, some part of of Aerie that he had not yet seen. Who was it who had taught her such magic? Why had she dedicated her life to finding slaves and killing slavers?

_And what strange power had she seen in me?_ Andrey refused to ask himself.

"Come with me," he dared to ask Aerie. She had spent most of her days and nights locked in her study, reading magic and preparing alchemy, isolating herself away from her friends. He could almost read her thought: _If I knew just that small amount more of sorcery, if I made one more battle potion, I could have prevented Alcaze's death._ "I want to forget everything, for just one night. Please help me pretend to be normal."

They saw a play at the Five Flagons Inn, laughed at the jokes and heard the troubadours sing. Andrey lost himself in the music, hearing what he could no longer create for himself. They bought roast chestnuts and pigs'-trotters from a street vendor, warming themselves next to his fire. Muffled up in plain coats, they might have been anyone, any two young travellers who only wanted to see the sights of Athkatla.

Andrey had asked around until he'd found the address of a place, had gone the previous night to stand in the back and look on and feel how alone he was. Tonight, he was not alone. He and Aerie joined the crush just as the violins struck up the Fisherman's Two-Step.

It was a dance hall in an ordinary district of Athkatla, for weavers and spinners and dockworkers, apprentices and labourers and milliners. Andrey offered Aerie his hand - his hand that looked close enough to a real hand, tonight. "May I have this dance?"

"I d-don't - " Aerie blushed, and looked horrified at herself for stuttering. Andrey felt: _this was dreadfully stupid of me; all I've done is make her more miserable_. "I don't know how to dance. Not the human way. When I was a child, I danced with my people ... but I don't remember how to do even that any more.

"But they all look so happy and carefree," Aerie added, watching the crowd. "I wish ... "

They stood next to each other in the back of the dance hall, watching young couples form and part and make circles and intricate patterns.

"I grew up in a library," Andrey said. "When my foster father saw me reading dancing masters' manuals, he arranged for me to take lessons with visiting nobles. I wanted to travel to places like this someday."

"He must have been very dear to you. What was his name?" Aerie asked.

"Gorion. He's dead; I watched him die." She must have guessed that his father was dead, that Andrey had nobody looking for him or fighting for him. His foster sister Imoen would have tried to seek him if she had known anything of what had happened, but Andrey wanted to think of Imoen happy and safe in Candlekeep. He wondered where Aerie had come from, whether she too knew parents and siblings. "Do you have ... " he asked tentatively.

"They are lost to me forever," Aerie said. It seemed to be a harsh grief she had long since decided to lock inside herself and never allow outsiders to see. "I told you that we had much in common."

"Suppose we were not what we are," Andrey said. He whispered, so that the harshness of his voice was at least a little bit disguised. "Suppose we came to Athkatla because we wanted to travel. Suppose we met here, for the first time. Just two people who want to learn how to dance."

"Imagine that," Aerie said. She slipped her hand in Andrey's left hand. It fit there as easily as a glove. "Imagine that we are two travellers, two strangers to Athkatla who have just met in this hall. I wish I knew how to dance," she said. "Will you show me?"

The music for a circle dance struck up. Andrey swept her out to the dance floor. You did not need words to learn dancing; they only got in the way. All you needed was the look in your eyes and a signal with your hands and feet, and your partner would follow your lead. Aerie was quick and light on her feet, swiftly getting the point. She smiled and even laughed when her hair began to fall down across her face during the energetic turns, stamped heavily on the with the best of them when the musicians played a silly dance.

Andrey wondered, not for the first time, how old Aerie was. Sometimes she seemed ageless and past his understanding, but at other times she seemed more like Imoen's age, a young girl. Tonight that side of her was uppermost. He lifted her in his arms and swung her through the air, and she was light and graceful as a bird. They danced until the last dance, when even the musicians were exhausted.

"It f-felt like flying," Aerie said, her cheeks aglow. "The most like flying since - since ever! Thank you, Andrey - it was what I most needed ... "

She leant up as if she would kiss him on the cheek, but then fell back with a blush. Andrey helped her into her cloak. They walked arm in arm back to the mansion. The halls were dark and deserted of people. It seemed all the world except for them was asleep.

"If we were ordinary," Andrey dared, "and I asked you for a kiss ... what would you say?"

—

Andrey woke as if from the most beautiful dream in his existence. Aerie pushed him down the side of the bed.

"Ssh! Hide yourself!" she said.

He was fully dressed; nothing more than a kiss, sitting together on Aerie's bed to watch the moonlight outside, had happened before they fell asleep. It had been a wonderful night. Through a gap in the bolster, Andrey saw Aerie walk to the large mirror on her bureau. It was covered with a black veil, but the decorations on the edges of it glowed and pulsed in a regular pattern. She tossed the veil away and sat down before it. Andrey saw a glimpse of a reflection in it ...

... a reflection that was not Aerie at all.

"That took you a while," a woman's voice said from the depths of the mirror. "Been having a good night?" She paused as if to savour Aerie's discomfort. "And so you should! You're young and ought to enjoy yourself. What have you to report?"

"Alcaze is dead. I am sorry," Aerie said.

"Death is not something to mourn. He knew the risks and took them," the woman said. "What did his death accomplish?"

"Alcaze and I destroyed Lehtinan the slaver and a crew of vampires," Aerie said. She talked in some detail about the specific spells she had used. Every so often, her mentor or teacher - for that seemed to be what this woman was - interrupted to give details and suggestions of what she should cast next time.

"I have a name and location for you. Bodhi, of Brynnlaw," Aerie said.

"That is good information, but I'm not ordering you there," the woman said. "Your mission is an elven city. Suldanessellar. Your description of Bodhi links up with what you'll find there."

_Suldanessellar._ It was where the vampire Tanova had said she'd come from. Andrey tried to puzzle out the mystery.

"There will be heavy fighting," the woman said. "An invading force has possession of the Tree of Life. It resists him, but the defenders of the city have lost all hope. Use your most powerful teleportation spell to go to the coordinates I will send you. Prepare for war. Who will you take?"

"The only useful ability among those rescued belongs to a shapeshifting child," Aerie said. "She'll stay here with Diana."

"What of the one you told me about before?"

"He is special," Aerie said, and Andrey knew that she was talking about him. "I will not take him into danger unless he chooses to come. I must protect him, as you have protected others like him."

"If he is one of the Children, he could be the key to victory in Suldanessellar. Take him," the woman ordered. "Do you remember the prophecies? Have you come any closer to discovering the ward of Gorion?"

"The choice is his," Aerie repeated sternly. "Goodbye, Melissan. Accompanied or not, I will see you shortly."

Aerie flung the veil over the mirror. Andrey struggled out of his hiding place to face her. He'd known from the start that she wanted something from him - and she had now let him see that something.

_She wants me to have a choice_, he knew, clung to. And yet he was afraid - afraid of the secrets she had kept from him, afraid of this strange woman who must be so much more powerful than even Aerie.

Andrey was still on his knees, mostly trapped between the bolster and the wall. Aerie sat down next to him, making them equal. She reached out her fingertips to touch him, but let her hand fall when he did not lean into the touch.

"How much do you know about death gods?" she asked him.

She told Andrey what she suspected in him, what she thought she had seen in him. The strange power in his blood marked him as the son of a god. He used the Soultaker dagger so easily because it was a gift created for his sire, Bhaal. Aerie was deliberately searching for people like him, people with strange magical abilities. Her mistress, Melissan, was once a priestess of the god of murder. She knew the prophecies intimately and taught Aerie to know all the signs. All across Faerun, children of the dead god of murder wakened and stirred and came to their divine heritage, coming near to plunge the Realms into bloody war.

"When you mentioned your father Gorion ... then I truly knew," she said. "Scholars of the prophecies fought so. They had so many wars of words over what Gorion's Ward was, what kind of strange spell that would be! Now I know it is you, and you are a demigod with a destiny."

Aerie told him about what she was, too. She was once a slave in a cage. It was Melissan who bought her, she said, because she had seen potential in Aerie. She made an apprentice of her, and taught her all the magic she knew - which was no small amount.

"My mistress sent me on this journey to prove myself and learn from the world," Aerie said. "It is a tradition for priests of Bhaal to do this at the end of their apprenticeship. I chose my own quest, to destroy any slaver that I found. I know what it is to be in a cage, Andrey."

He was apparently the son of a god, and he'd been locked in chains and cages and used as labour and prey. He was crippled, his hand and his voice destroyed. This heritage had brought him nothing but pain. _Gorion was probably murdered because of this_, Andrey thought. He wondered what had become of his father's murderer. He felt too numb to care about that at present.

"We can destroy anyone who would put us in a cage, Andrey. Together. We have the power to set people free," Aerie pleaded with him. "Please believe me ... I understand your feelings."

She slipped back from him and lifted her robes over her head. For a moment, Andrey thought he guessed what she was offering to him - then saw it was something else entirely. Something far more intimate than merely trying to bargain with flesh. It was no exchange for coin or kind. It was an understanding of who and what Aerie was.

Two wide, deep scars marked her back. The flesh there was still red and inflamed. Old marks from whippings and cuts, too, told a grim story. A few lumps of bone still protruded from Aerie's back. There were a few twisted feathers that still clung to them. She'd been mutilated.

"I was once a winged elf," she said, her back turned to him, her arms folded tightly around her and her fingers clenching the flesh of her shoulders. "They put me in a cage. People paid two coppers to walk past and look at me. I begged them to set me free, but my wings became infected. They cut them off to save my life. I would rather have died. I became a servant of the circus, the lowest sweeper and cleaner among them. You wouldn't have liked me, then. I was stuttering and helpless. Melissan spared me. She tried to find someone to help me, but not all injuries are capable of regeneration. I still miss my wings, but there are other things I can do."

She'd lost two limbs and still gave of herself, rather than lie down and weep for what she had lost, Andrey thought, realised. _We have something in common. _In his whirling mind, she was the only thought that he wished to concentrate on.

"I think I would have liked you no matter where or when we met," Andrey said. _Loved you, even._ He went closer to her. Cautiously, he embraced Aerie's mutilated back, sharing his warmth with her cold skin. He kissed the nape of her neck, first gently, then more insistently. Within him, he felt death and murder were utterly mixed with life and love. He clung to Aerie as his only lifeline in the world, the only person who cared for him. And he understood that she too was lonely: an archmage on a secret mission, able to trust so few people, burying many comrades along the way. She'd lost everything that had once mattered to her. Andrey wanted to comfort her, wanted it more than he wanted anything else in the world.

Aerie turned and flung her arms around his neck. She kissed him on the mouth with her soft rosebud lips. She sat on his lap and locked her arms around his neck as if she'd never let him go. Andrey moved lower down to her chin, her neck, her shoulders, her chest. He wanted to know everything there was to know about her, hold her and never let go. She was soft, so very soft, and yielded willingly to his touch.

Aerie's hands met the hem of his shirt. Looking into his eyes, she began to lift it. He nodded.

They lay on the thick rug by Aerie's fire, slowly exploring each other's bodies, drinking in with eyes and careful touches each slow-waking moment of a new world opening before them.

"I haven't, before ... " Andrey tried to explain. In the mines and the gladiator pits, he'd mercifully escaped being forced to give his body; he was too tall and broad to be the kind of prey they most preferred. Some other slaves had taken comfort with each other, but he'd never found such a companion. Until now. He licked around Aerie's navel and paused.

"You're my first," Aerie said. She stroked the top of his head and looked longingly at him. He bent his head to know her sweetness.


	5. Chapter 5

Suldanessellar was once a monumental city of surpassing beauty. It lay in ruins. Fires still smouldered in once-proud buildings nestled among the trees. Corpses of elves and rakshasa lay unburied over the ground. It was a deserted graveyard. Walking on it was like walking on the moon.

Andrey and Aerie walked deeper. There, at the centre, the heart of Suldanessellar was once the Tree of Life. The Tree was crumbling to black death and decay. Four figures were dimly visible in the centre of the trunk. They sat as if they were part of the dying tree, rooted from its heart and outwards, four fungal growths nestled atop its branches.

Andrey held Aerie's hand. They were told that Jon Irenicus, called the Shattered One, and his sister Bodhi, mistress of Tanova, marched into the elven city and murdered Queen Ellesime. Their goal was the Tree of Life, a divine tree planted by the elven gods themselves. Irenicus wished to rise and insert himself into the elven pantheon.

The first time he tried to take the Tree, the elves exiled him.

The second time he tried to take the Tree, he carried the power of two stolen Bhaalspawn souls.

Nothing living stirred while Aerie and Andrey, elf and Bhaalspawn, approached Suldanessellar's heart. The Shattered One and his sister sat next to each other, legs crossed over, as if they meditated. Two bound, emaciated prisoners lay behind them. It looked as if it would be easy and simple to kill the four sleepers. But appearances were incredibly deceptive.

Andrey looked at his feet. The Tree was melting around his footsteps. Every step sunk him and Aerie deeper into the decaying trunk. They could feel the power that covered Irenicus like a tangible cloud of sizzling fog. It bled and rained from the seemingly empty figure, a torrent, a whirlwind. No other had been able to even approach the Shattered One. But in Andrey, there was an awakened power linked to the divine soul Irenicus had stolen. It knew its own and sought its own.

The Shattered One opened his left eye a crack. There was a golden glow, surrounding Andrey and Aerie, taking Andrey and Aerie. Their bodies collapsed on the trunk of the Tree like wooden puppets discarded by a careless child. Their souls fled to join Irenicus in hell.

Andrey woke, reached out with his left hand for Aerie. She wasn't there. Nothing and nobody was there. He stood in a bare plain as far as the eye could see, nothing for him here or in the distance but shattered black glass covering walls and ceilings. There was no visible light source but a dull grey glow covered everything.

As if it were written on letters on fire inside his bone marrow, Andrey knew the nature of this place. _The dead god Bhaal laid tricks and traps for any offspring who might dare become presumptuous. There can be only one Child of Bhaal to win._

The landscape shifted imperceptibly, and Andrey faced a tall slender man with desperate yellow eyes. His skin hung on him in wrinkles that showed a once-muscled man who'd been starved. To look at him was enough: this man also knew what it was like to be a prisoner and a slave.

"Brother. Do you remember me ... ?" asked the bald, emaciated man.

Andrey shook his head. The face - heavily tattooed - was nothing to him. The man glared harshly.

"Andrey of Candlekeep, ward of Gorion. I walked past you in the courtyard. You were a carefree child, twiddling with a mandolin. I was a scholar. You met me as Koveras the monk. The one who showed such interest in the prophecies of Alaundo."

Name didn't really ring a bell. It sent a shiver up Andrey's spine. This man, this child of Bhaal - his brother - had walked past him and he had not known. He had sought him out.

"You escaped your fate, brother. You escaped a thousand bounty notices I placed up and down the Sword Coast for you." The emaciated man coughed dryly. "I was Sarevok Anchev, Grand Duke of Baldur's Gate, Terror of the Sword Coast. I was on the verge of starting a bloody war with Amn. Then Irenicus the Shattered One took me. He asked where you were. I could not tell him. I suffered all the pain he intended for you.

"Now die, brother."

Sarevok was on him in a flash. Andrey was almost his height and his body was not nearly so wasted. Sarevok wrestled with desperation and skill, all rules of combat thrown out the window in brutality and the sheer art of survival. His two hands outmatched Andrey's one.

Andrey felt and gave harsh bruises while they rolled about on the harsh surface. Sharp edges cut and bloodied both them. They were indeed brothers; they could feel Bhaal's poisoned essence within them.

"You killed Gorion," Andrey said. He could sense that murder within Sarevok, that murder atop ten thousand other deaths. This son of Bhaal had killed and ravaged across the Sword Coast and would have killed and ravaged far more if the Shattered One had not taken him.

Andrey looked into Sarevok's eyes and saw a mirror of himself.

"Gorion _abandoned_ me! All the children were sacrificed, but Gorion chose a mewling infant to save above me! I was owed the revenge that I took!"

"I loved him," Andrey said.

Gorion would not have willingly let a child perish - he must have saved all he could that night. Andrey had known his foster father, and that memory of love gave Andrey a strength Sarevok didn't possess. Another part of him felt the might-have-been. Gorion could have saved another child. This boy had grown up on the streets, been adopted as a toy by a wealthy merchant, rose to achieve worldly power beyond Andrey's dreams. In another existence, would Andrey have done as much for himself?

Or did it not matter?

Andrey knocked Sarevok back on to a sharp obsidian edge. It was a lucky blow. He moved in with his good hand as quickly as he could, punching Sarevok's skull on the bruised edge as many times as he could.

Weakened by the tortures of the Shattered One, the tide of the battle turned against Sarevok. Andrey beat him down for the sake of his own survival, killed just he had been made to do in the arena.

He'd thought that death and murder clustered around Sarevok - but Andrey too was a killer born and bred in the bone. He forced himself to look on Sarevok's body while it dissolved into dust.

He looked up with a bloodied face and saw a black door open before him.

_You prevailed in a trial of death_, a voice spoke and did not speak words. _This is a trial of love._

"Aerie!"

Andrey reached out for her. She was stronger than him, wiser than him, a skilled archmage in every way. She was trapped, unconscious. In this bizarre place, she was imprisoned in a glass casket that hung on a thin thread above a deep pit. She couldn't hear him. He watched, terrified, as her prison swayed and teetered on the edge of her doom. The rope that held her was bound to a stone, with small runes carved into it that Andrey couldn't quite read.

"You must choose, Bhaalspawn. Sacrifice or spare. Which will you pick?"

Something tapped on his shoulder.

He turned, and there behind him was the second of Irenicus' emaciated prisoners. Small, stick-thin, her head recently shaved bare and covered with a thin cloud of mousy brown. Scars on her face, across her eyebrow and cheeks. Andrey hadn't recognised her when he saw her in the tree.

"Heya, brother," she said. "It's me. Imoen."

The two siblings sat down on a cairn of rocks, as if they couldn't stand upright any more.

"I thought you were back in Candlekeep. Hoped you were safe back in Candlekeep."

"No way, no day," Imoen said. Unlike the old Imoen, she barely raised her head to speak. The light had gone out of her eyes. "You bufflehead, didn't you know I'd sneak along looking for you? Found Mister G.'s body out there on the road, searched for you practically forever, never found you. You sod. Time passed and I fell in with this one knucklehead, Eldoth Kron. Thought he was an interesting rogue at first. I liked his girl, Skie. Maybe I even loved her. We had some good times, before Skie and me realised what Eldoth was. He was a right bastard. Poor Skie.

"Then Jon Irenicus captured me. Turns out we really _were_ brother and sister. Did ya know that, Andrey? I didn't," Imoen said. "He'd cut and ask me and ask me and ask me about you, but I never told. I didn't have nothing to tell. He used ol' Sarry instead. He was our brother too, though I never knew him. Looks like you wiped ol' Mister Fancypants Ex Grand Duke from the gameboard, brother."

"Children of Bhaal, the three of us," Andrey said. "I was captured myself, Imoen. I couldn't get free. They took my hand." Imoen gave a cavalier nod to his stump as if she'd experienced worse injuries. "She was the one who freed me."

"So little brother got himself a girl. How sweet," Imoen said, with a twist of her lips. "Irenicus killed my girl. Skie. Fried her in half a second flat because she wasn't any use to him. You're so lucky, brother."

"Irenicus is a monster. We can stop him, the three of us," Andrey said.

For the first time, Imoen raised her head. A bubbling laugh with no humour in it came out of her mouth.

"Ya don't _get_ it, brother! This is _your_ trial. You get to choose which of the two of us lives or dies. Who do you love, your girl or your own sister that you never bothered to come rescue?" Imoen said. "You already know the answer, so it's just a form to go through."

Andrey started away from her in horror. "No. I can't lose either of you. Aerie would - Aerie saves the helpless and the imprisoned."

He wondered, what-could-have-been, what-should-have-been. If Aerie was never captured by slavers, if she'd stayed among the avariel and grown into a thespian as she'd dreamt in her childhood. If Andrey was not a Bhaalspawn, but an ordinary troubadour in Candlekeep. If Imoen was truly Winthrop's daughter and no dead god's. They could have met when a flying avariel theatrical troupe came to look up historical plays in Candlekeep. Andrey and Aerie could have roamed the Candlekeep gardens together, hand in hand by the fountains. Imoen would have pranked them, set loud bells to ring on all the doors just as they were trying to sneak back in the keep without being spotted. In a song, they could have all been happy.

"I'm worse than imprisoned," Imoen told him. "My soul's out for rent, he gave my soul to the vampire Bodhi. He broke me. Nothing anyone can do to fix me, not now. There's a bond between me and Bodhi, so maybe this works. If I hurt Bodhi, then at least you and your girl got a better chance of taking down the monsters. Yeah. I'll take that chance, brother."

Imoen stood, and raised a hand. Andrey realised with horror that she held a dagger. _His_ dagger. "Always was a great pickpocket, little brother," Imoen said. "This one's my choice."

She slashed the dagger across her own throat. Andrey tried to stop her; he swore that he tried to stop his sister Bhaalspawn. Imoen's life's blood stained the rune stone, and while she faded away Aerie's glass coffin began to rise.

"Not trapped inside," Andrey begged the dagger - the one that held the souls of monsters. "No, please, Imoen - "

_No soul-trapping for us, little brother_, something whispered back to him. _We Bhaalspawn don't have souls. It's death and dust and nothing else._

_I could sure use a nap about now. G'night, Andrey. Goodbye._

He wept over Imoen's dust, but all too soon Aerie guided him forward.

—

"So you have passed your trials. My sister and I passed ours, and we challenge you to battle for all the divine power. I will remake the Tree in my own image, and rule as a god in the pantheon of the elves!"

"Your power is stolen and Andrey is stronger than you'll ever be, Shattered One," Aerie answered Jon Irenicus. "Now die!"

She looked at Andrey as if to say, _You have a strength that you don't yet know_. Andrey drew the dagger and readied himself. Aerie's magic unfolded like a star, meeting and matching the Shattered One. Trained by Melissan, she could hold her own against this prodigy of the elves who'd done so much harm to his own and other peoples.

The vampire descended on Andrey. She was a much better fighter than he was. He pushed her off him, barely managing to defend himself. _She stole Imoen's soul_, he reminded himself, and shouted his rage at her in a battle cry.

It passed through his throat with no resistance.

Andrey shouted again, and this time the strange power he had felt in the arena returned to his voice. He was loud, melodious, powerful. The trials he faced had restored this part of him. He sang a battle song, his voice a rich and full baritone once more, and as he sang the words and melody took on life of their own. That raw shining force he'd summoned against Hendak in the gladiator pits came again at his will. Bodhi screamed as he hit her with it, sung magic to surround her, magic to batter her down.

He sang a song from Candlekeep glees, one he'd sung with Imoen and their old friends a thousand times. _This is for Imoen._ Magic surged by Andrey's command of his voice. He sung harmonies to merge and augment Aerie's patterns in the Weave, melodies strong enough to pierce a soul.

Jon Irenicus and his sister fell, and the battle for Suldanessellar was done.

—

Aerie and Andrey sat by a campfire made from dead wood. They were still the only living people who could be seen for miles. Suldanessellar was just as dead and destroyed as it had been before they came.

"Battles and grief for the fallen are no easy thing," Aerie said. She rested her head against Andrey's shoulders, wrapped in his warm grip. "I would I could tell you it becomes easier. It does not. But I am proud of you, and Melissan will be too." There was so much veneration and gratitude in her voice when she spoke of the woman who'd mentored her.

"Why do you like her so much?" She'd sent Aerie into grave danger, and seemed to want to keep doing it over and over again, Andrey thought.

"Because she's determined," Aerie said. "Melissan never gives up. She mastered every kind of magic. Even when she was a priestess, she studied magic and fighting as well. When she lost her powers when Bhaal died, she was still an archmage. She survived when others did not. She taught me a lot of her magic, but I was never any good at fighting. She's extraordinary at all of it, spells and using weapons and even hand to hand."

"I've always known Melissan's powerful ... and yet she's never helped you fight. Why is that?" Andrey said.

"She has so many other matters to attend to," Aerie said. "The breadth of what she plans is stupendous, Andrey. I will tell you all I know about it - and she will too. But for now, I just want to be with you." She looked up into his face. "Will you sing me something, now your voice is returned?"

The ashes from the dying fire fell like grey snowflakes on the ground before them.

"I'll sing love songs," Andrey said.


	6. Chapter 6

Melissan gathered five Bhaalspawn together, formed a union between them. The Five ravaged the land of Tethyr together, parcelling it up between them in five chosen territories. They raised their armies, mustered their resoures.

Then the spark of conflict was lit like a candle flame catching a light muslin curtain, and all was fire and blood and death.

Gromnir Il-Khan was a killer without fear or favour. His life was dedicated to gratifying his basest appetites the moment he felt them. His army ran riot in Saradush and left the city a gutted wreck. He'd earned his death, Andrey thought.

Yaga-Shura was a fire giant who'd done just as much as Gromnir to destroy Saradush. Another would-be conqueror who'd made his mark on his men by force. Utterly heartless, he could not be reasoned with or swayed by empathy.

Sendai the drow had grown up with slavery since birth. She'd embraced it in her conquest, not just enslaving people in body but enslaving them in mind as well, feeding her prey to mind flayers and collaring them to take away their free will. So many children of Bhaal were merely monsters.

Abazigal the dragon believed he deserved to rule by divine right. Not only was he the son of a god, he was also the mightiest kind of creature that lived on the face of Faerun. He'd made sure to force a dragon from the most powerful bloodline he could find to mate him, and create a son and heir to his throne. And just like the storybooks said, to fight dragons was the way to go. Andrey and Aerie found Abazigal's imprisoned wife, asked her to be their ally, and on Melissan's orders finally defeated the dragon. The dragon queen flew away, weeping for her son.

The fifth Bhaalspawn was a good man. Balthazar. He became a monk to keep away the rising tide of murder in his soul and spirit. He mentored countless other monks, teaching young beggars and orphans how to fight and how to live in peace with others. He was the only one of the Five who was not a monster.

He'd also been the only one of the Five who knew enough not to trust Melissan.

The era of the Bhaalspawn drew to an end. Bhaal had created hundreds of children, each with a tiny portion of his essence. Every time a Bhaalspawn life ended, their divine essence flowed to the throne of Bhaal and united with others. The buildup of divine power was there to bring Bhaal back to life ...

... or to be claimed by another.

Melissan, Bhaal's priestess, had known so much more about his plans than anyone else who still lived. The moment she had learnt her master's plan was the moment she resolved to seize such power for herself.

"Remain dust, my foolish god," she boasted. She turned upon Balthazar. "You think that you would challenge me?"

"I would see Bhaal's essence destroyed for good," Balthazar said. "When I am the last Bhaalspawn standing, I will kill myself and the evil taint will be purged from all of Faerun. That is the only right choice."

Balthazar looked to Andrey - his brother. They'd fought side by side as if they were allies. Together, they had tracked Gromnir Il-Khan to a covert in the swamp and defended themselves against his last stand. They'd rescued children he had taken as slaves, restored them to their families. They'd become friends as much as the cold and dedicated Balthazar could make friends with anyone. Andrey was the only person who'd even come close to making Balthazar smile - it turned out the grim monk had a weakness for comic songs with the most groanworthy puns that could be found in Faerun.

But to turn against Melissan? Andrey was torn in two.

"I cannot intervene," announced the Solar, a tall blue-skinned woman with glowing golden wings, who stood at the centre of this cosmic arena. She was a creature of the heavens, of the god above gods Ao himself, who took witness of the Bhaalspawn struggles and agonies. "You must resolve this conflict on your own."

"Andrey?" Melissan asked him. She had the ability to sound almost kind when she wanted to. "I want you to give me your power. When I am a goddess, I will reward you and Aerie. We have understood this for a long time now."

"She would make an evil goddess," Balthazar cut in. "She would make a tyrant, make a world crushed below the heel of her boot. She wants only power. You know her well enough to know this. Fight with me, brother, if you claim to be against injustice."

Aerie stood by Andrey's side. Her fingers lightly brushed his glove. They had spoken of this before, in quiet midnight moments when they were utterly alone, not even the moonlight hearing them. _I love you, and whither thou goest, there I will go. Your choice is free and I will hold you by no bond or chain. Even if you choose to go to a place where I cannot follow, I will always love you._

Andrey offered his hand to Balthazar. Then brother and brother Bhaalspawn fought by each other's side.

Melissan summoned hordes of creatures to fight them. Andrey lashed out with his voice, with a staff especially shaped to fit in his prosthetic hand. Melissan had given him the weapon, had painstakingly taught him how to fight again even as he was. He fought ice elementals that blistered his skin with cold, sung chords that shattered the hearts of giant trolls from the deep.

Aerie stood aside. She could not fight the woman who had redeemed her from slavery, and could not fight her love. Melissan understood that choice. The battle for Bhaal's throne stood between three.

Balthazar stunned seven-headed demons with a single kick, pierced the glowing hearts of fire elementals and crushed the hot coals in his fist. He was battered and battle weary, but he and Andrey made their way through the portals of Bhaal. They came to the foot of Melissan's stolen throne.

Balthazar was almost at the end of his limits, but there was enough in him to make a last stand against the woman who'd betrayed him. He leapt at her, knocking Melissan's pike out of her hands. They faced each other in hand to hand combat, the skill and strength and speed of a trained monk against a Deathstalker priestess of Bhaal. Melissan bowled Balthazar over with a spinning kick, then he turned his fall into flight. He was magnificent, his disciplined body trained and conditioned across his lifetime for this moment of fighting destiny. He launched himself with the death of Melissan in the tips of his fingers.

But Balthazar found only his own death when his brother Andrey turned on him. Andrey stabbed him in the back and watched him die. Balthazar's face shattered in a horror of betrayal, and then he was dust.

Melissan had been thrown to the ground. Andrey approached. He could have attacked then. Melissan had fought as hard as Balthazar had, had been drawn near the limits of her energies and spells. He might have stood a chance against her, might have taken his place on the throne of his father and become a god of death. But instead Andrey let the staff Melissan had given him fall from his grasp.

The game Bhaal had so subtly plotted for was lost. His servant Amelyssan the Black-Hearted had lived when her master died. She ascended the throne and was lost in a blaze of light.

The plane broke apart below Andrey's feet. Aerie ran to him. Below and around them was nothingness, splintered spars of a place that was never a real place and now went to nothing. The ground and ceiling dissolved all around them, shattering and crashing and melting away. They stood on one of the last spars that remained. It too was fading away.

"_Well done, my good and faithful servants. I will reward you as I promised. In fact, it would be foolish of me not to._"

The goddess appeared before them. No longer was the symbol of the god of death a skull surrounded by twelve tears: it was a dark heart beating with red veins, enveloped by the feather motifs that Melissan had favoured in life. Emblems of a long since vanished tribe, she once told her apprentice in an unguarded moment.

"Your taint is gone," she told Andrey. "To be a normal man was your wish. One without power, but one also without a thirst for blood and murder."

He felt cleansed and weak at the same time, lifted and changed to feelings he hadn't known since childhood.

The goddess Melissan nodded to her once apprentice. Wings erupted from Aerie's back where her scars had been. They were not the white, feathered wings she had described to Andrey. These were akin to vast bats' wings, dark red shot through with shining golden tendons, wings of magic and might. They moved in response to Aerie's will rather than the movement of muscles she no longer used. They flapped open. She caught both Andrey's wrists in her hands, lifting him with the strength of the frost giant belt about her waist.

Then they were gone from that vanished plane of a divine throne. They were high above the lands of Faerun, above fields of green and blue and brown and banks of fleecy white cloud. Ice cold winds battered them, threw them above and about through updrafts and tempests. They kept hold of each other nonetheless, seeing the world in a way they had never done before.

The wide blue skies opened to them.


End file.
